Tag: Chuck Palahniuk

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The Short Version: Ten years have passed since the end of Fight Club – and in that time, Sebastian (that’s his name, now) and Marla got married and had a baby and discovered the mundanity of ordinary life. But Tyler Durden wasn’t just a split personality… and he certainly isn’t gone… The Review: I think everybody and their mother had a moment of head-scratching when it was announced that Chuck Palahniuk was not only writing a sequel to Fight Club but that […]

The Short Version: A town like Portland, Oregon is the sort of town you’d expect Chuck Palahniuk to live in. So it’s no surprise that he would be the one to put together an off-beat travel guide of sorts, as part of the Crown Journeys series. It’s a time capsule of sorts but also a way to see a different side of a very weird city. The Review: A couple of weeks ago, I took a proper vacation for the […]

The Short Version: The latest teenage trend is a defibrillator to the temples, a father follows a strange man called Tyler into the bowels of a German city, fathers and sons try to understand each other, and a Jew saves Christmas in just a few of the stories in Chuck Palahniuk’s first true short story collection. The Review: The best thing about this collection is how surprising it is. You sort of think, at this point, that you know Chuck […]

my terribly messy scribblings all over the program… Have you ever been to a Chuck Palahniuk reading? The last one I went to, I got hit in the face with a bag of Almond Joy (hurled by Mr. P himself), inflated a beach ball, and caught a severed arm. So. Didn’t quite know what to expect at a slightly more refined event – but I knew Palahniuk would find a way to meld his delightfully weird sensibility with whatever he was […]

The Short Version: Carl is a reporter on the trail of a story about Sudden Infant Death Syndrome. As it turns out, he once had a child die from it too – and he notices a strange coincidence: a particular lullaby from an innocuous book of songs & poems from around the world. Except this song isn’t so innocuous: it’s a culling song, able to kill the person who hears it. So Carl sets out, with the help of a haunted-house […]

The Short Version: C. Linus Maxwell is the most notorious bachelor on the planet. A multi-billionaire and lover of some of the most famous women in the world. And somehow, Penny Harrigan, a low-level associate at the law firm representing his most recent breakup, has caught his eye. But once she’s with him, she discovers that he’s preparing a line of sex toys for women – and that his plans might not be so innocuous as pleasure… The Review: I’m saying […]

The Short Version: Madison Spencer, previously damned to hell, is still dead. But after she misses her curfew on Halloween night, she ends up stuck on Earth as a ghost – Purgatory, if you will. As she returns to her former haunts (buh dum tsh!), we start to discover more about her life and her history and it suddenly becomes clear that maybe her damnation wasn’t an accident after all. Maddie Spencer might, in fact, be far more important than […]

The Short Version: Shannon McFarland, fashion model extraordinaire, has lost the bottom half of her face in a horrific gunshot accident. She falls in with Brandy Alexander and her ex-fiance and sets off across the country to scam drugs and to attempt to kill both of her companions. Of course, nothing is remotely what it appears to be – this is Palahniuk after all. The Review: I remember reading Invisible Monsters in my parents’ greenhouse in high school, some holiday break, […]

The Short Version: Madison Spencer, thirteen years old, has ended up in Hell. She’s most certainly dead – of what she initially believes to be a marijuana overdose and later discovers to be something a bit more gruesome – and she’s having a bit of a tough time adjusting to damnation. And that’s before the bureaucracy comes in… that’s when things really get screwy… The Review: Alright, let’s get the most important question out of the way first. Yes, this is easily […]